Speech analytics has arrived. Once viewed through a hazy prism of artificial intelligence, the technology is now widely employed by medium and large contact centers to increase ROI, ensure quality service and optimize agent training based on the content of calls as well as agent performance.

Speech analytics is typically used as part of a business process optimization (BPO) system, a capability also encompassing communications recording, quality management, eLearning and workforce management. BPO provides an enterprise-wide capability to improve operations, human resources and nearly any facet of your organization, and speech analytics represents a crucial component of its service.

Here are seven pointers you should consider when evaluating this pioneering technology for your own organization.

Image: Speech Analytics

1. Speech analytics can provide automatic categorization of calls for high-volume contact centers with an otherwise unmanageable number of conversations. Its most fundamental capability involves keyword spotting to look for calls containing critical words or phrases used in a promotional campaign or general product support. The ability to group calls without listening to each one decreases manpower needs and improves operations.

2. Speech analytics works in tandem with voice and screen recording as well as quality management solutions to create a comprehensive picture of how an interaction is handled. It should also be viewed as an enabler for other systems rather than a stand-alone device. The synergy among speech analytics and other elements of BPO provide an entirely new way of looking at your contact center and core business.

3. Speech analytics can provide an edge for contact centers in highly competitive industries. Most already utilize some form of quality control, agent analysis and automated training. By supplementing those capabilities with speech analytics, you can increase your knowledge of your contact center’s interface with your customers. This overview can impact your company on an enterprise-wide basis and can result in wide-ranging changes to increase operational efficiency or agent performance.

4. Speech analytics provides emotion detection to spot problem calls. Whether it’s raised voices or emphatic keywords, this capability assists with conflict resolution, best-practices training and the ability to ensure courteous interactions for both inbound and outbound communications. Related voice recognition systems can recognize a specific customer and may be used for gender and age spotting as well, especially when these demographics become critical.

5. Speech analytics utilizes three technologies of increasing sophistication: keyword spotting, phonetic indexing and speech-to-text transcription.
   
   Keyword spotting, an entry-level function of speech analytics, searches for calls with any pre-defined phrasing. It can be used for manual evaluations, coaching, root-cause analysis and many other purposes.
   
   Phonetic indexing translates calls into a database of phonemes. Though the process is slower than keyword searching, once the translation has been completed, it provides faster repeat searches.
   
   With complete speech-to-text transition, speech analytics allows the most comprehensive and extensive evaluation via the text documents created, especially when thinking of a following text analysis based on artificial intelligence.

6. By improving your ability to spot problem calls, speech analytics can impact directly upon your customer base. When engaged in a promotional campaign, the ability to analyze the effectiveness of your approach can prove crucial to your ultimate success. In addition to spotting low performance areas, speech analytics can help analyze and execute minor tweaks in your agents’ script or ensure script adherence in the first place.

7. Speech analytics often serves as a post-process solution. In other words, analysis becomes available some time after an event. In the future, solutions will become more efficient and provide results at near real-time levels. Of course, speech analytics can be supplemented with real-time quality management (QM) capability. Some QM solutions even allow agent consultation with the supervisor during difficult calls without the customer’s knowledge.

Speech analytics is no longer the wave of the future, and in today’s business climate, due diligence demands its evaluation for your contact center.